Links for the Day: The Dark Powers of Fraternities, Judi Dench Interview, Manohla Dargis on Jennifer Lawrence, Wesley Morris on the State of Gay Culture, & More

1. “The Dark Powers of Fraternities.” A yearlong investigation of Greek houses reveals their endemic, lurid, and sometimes tragic problems—and a sophisticated system for shifting the blame.

“The notion that fraternities are target defendants did not hold true in my investigation. College students can (and do) fall out of just about any kind of residence, of course. But during the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students. I began to view Amanda Andaverde’s situation in a new light. Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations? And why do the lawsuits against fraternities for this kind of serious injury and death—so predictable and so preventable—have such a hard time getting traction? The answers lie in the recent history of fraternities and the colleges and universities that host them.”

“As the legendary Judi Dench nears her 80th birthday, she is enjoying as great a third act as any actor ever has. In January, for her performance as a mother searching for her long-lost child in Stephen Frears’ Philomena (which is based on the true story of Philomena Lee), she landed her seventh Oscar nomination; all of them, including her best supporting actress win for just eight minutes of work in Shakespeare in Love, have come in the past 16 years, since she turned 63. And, despite macular degeneration, which has robbed her of most of her eyesight, and recent knee surgery, which has hobbled her movement, the Dame has no plans of slowing down her schedule anytime soon.”

“From Ms. Lawrence’s interviews, her off-screen mugging, photo bombing and Marty Feldman-caliber eye popping, she doesn’t appear especially interested in playing the star; being human seems enough for now. That isn’t as easy as it sounds given how profoundly difficult it’s become for stars to have anything like a private life—to walk to a yoga class or pass out drunk in a friend’s car—without becoming fodder for tabloids and gossip sites. Some stars handle the lack of privacy disastrously, feeding the beast even as it eats them, while others turn their lives into performances that they deliver one item at a time, as Angelina Jolie brilliantly does. Many just smile and repeat the same canned answers about how thrilling it was to work with this other famous person.”

“Episode 5 was a movie unto itself. For one day, the other characters ceased to exist. The world seemed to stop in order for one man to understand the other better. The day began and ended in bed, but included a train ride, a stroll through Golden Gate Park to the Morrison Planetarium, a conversation at Ocean Beach, and a visit to a fortune-teller. If you were down on or ambivalent about Looking, if you found it boring or lazy or flavorless, if you were still feeling it out, this was the episode meant to push you off the fence. Patrick and Richie’s morning-after date doubles as a treatise on how to turn love into discourse without losing the balance of romance and comedy, not unlike those Richard Linklater movies with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke—this would be Before Outer Sunset. ’Look at what we’re finding out about each other,’ Patrick says. ’Neither of us has AIDS. You don’t like your teeth. You have bad taste in movies.’ At the Morrison, a conversation about anal-sex terminology and its limitations begins with them gazing up at the stars. Richie is reminded of the time on Friends that Ross took Rachel to a planetarium on their first real date.”

5. “Let the Witness Speak.” In Claude Lanzmann’s new Holocaust documentary The Last of the Unjust, the line between right and wrong blurs.

“The Last of the Unjust fleshes out much of the Holocaust’s berserk paradigm, in particular the basic moral dilemma between resistance’s capacity for additional destruction and cooperation’s potential for saving lives. Murmelstein is relentlessly self-justifying, but you come away with the unarguable sense that the position in which the rabbi was put—the position in which every Jew was put—was essentially impossible, and cannot be dissected or assessed in an ordinary social context. Conclusions about survivors’ behavior should always be drawn with superhuman prudence.”

Video of the Day: The Sacrament gets a Red Band trailer:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

At long last, we’re finally going to see more of Deadwood. Very soon after the HBO series’s cancellation in 2006, creator David Milch announced that he agreed to produce a pair of two-hour films to tie up the loose ends left after the third season. It’s been a long road since, and after many false starts over the years, production on one standalone film started in fall 2018. And today we have a glorious teaser for the film, which releases on HBO on May 31. Below is the official description of the film:

The Deadwood film follows the indelible characters of the series, who are reunited after ten years to celebrate South Dakota’s statehood. Former rivalries are reignited, alliances are tested and old wounds are reopened, as all are left to navigate the inevitable changes that modernity and time have wrought.

Watch: Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Gets Teaser Trailer

When it rains, it pours. Four days after Quentin Tarantino once more laid into John Ford in a piece written for his Beverly Cinema website that saw the filmmaker referring to Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon as Tie a Yellow Ribbon, and two days after Columbia Pictures released poster art for QT’s ninth feature that wasn’t exactly of the highest order, the studio has released a teaser for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The film was announced early last year, with Tarantino describing it as “a story that takes place in Los Angeles in 1969, at the height of hippy Hollywood.”

Set on the eve of the Manson family murders, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tells the story of TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), as they try to get involved in the film industry. The film also stars Margot Robbie (as Sharon Tate), Al Pacino, the late Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Dakota Fanning, Emile Hirsch, Timothy Olyphant, Kurt Russell, and Bruce Dern in a part originally intended for the late Burt Reynolds.

Watch the Stranger Things 3 Trailer, and to the Tune of Mötley Crüe and the Who

A wise woman once said that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. On Friday, Jeff Tremaine’s The Dirt, a biopic about Mötley Crüe’s rise to fame, drops on Netflix. Today, the streaming service has released the trailer for the third season of Stranger Things. The clip opens with the strains of Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home,” all the better to underline that the peace and quiet that returned to the fictional rural town of Hawkins, Indiana at the end of the show’s second season is just waiting to be upset again.

Little is known about the plot of the new season, and the trailer keeps things pretty vague, though the Duffer Brothers have suggested that the storyline will take place a year after the events of the last season—duh, we know when “Home Sweet Home” came out—and focus on the main characters’ puberty pangs. That said, according to Reddit sleuths who’ve obsessed over such details as the nuances of the new season’s poster art, it looks like Max and company are going to have to contend with demon rats no doubt released from the Upside Down.

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